Rewrite That Witch
CH184 · Rewrite
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Chapter 184: Self

Scroll stood at the bedroom door a moment longer than she needed to, decided, and pushed it open.

Wendy was at the table with a book open in front of her and an expression Scroll had almost never seen on her face: the specific misery of someone whose will is entirely engaged with something that is simply not yielding. The book’s cover, even from the doorway, was recognizable. Basic Theory of Natural Science. Roland’s lectures written down, the ones about invisible particles and the behavior of light and why hot air rises.

Scroll stepped inside and let herself smile. She had not seen this expression on Wendy in — she wasn’t sure she’d ever seen it, actually. Wendy, who had guided the Witch Cooperation Association through the Impassable Mountain Range while they were rationing food to the point of genuine danger, had never looked miserable. She had smiled through all of it, producing calm where there was none to find, never letting her own difficulties show while she was managing everyone else’s.

A book was doing what the Impassable Mountain Range had not.

“You can’t understand it at all, can you?” Scroll said, taking a stool. “When I read it the first time I thought the same.”

Wendy looked up with the expression of someone who had been hoping for Nightingale and was adjusting to the alternative. “And now?”

“Still impossible.”

“That is very reassuring.” Wendy closed the book. “Anna could do it. And then Soraya — I did not expect Soraya to be the second, but she found a way through by herself. From a painting skill into a coating ability, by thinking about particles.” She set her hand on the closed cover. “If I’m not working hard enough I’ll be left behind by the younger witches. And I still don’t understand how His Highness knows so much, or why the things he says about the invisible world turn out to be true.”

“There are many things he doesn’t know,” Scroll said. “Relevant things.”

“Such as?”

Scroll was quiet for a moment, organizing her approach. “It’s Nightingale. You’ve noticed the change in her behavior, I assume.”

Wendy waited.

“She’s stopped going invisible when she’s in the office. She listens during the evening lectures — actually listens, not just sits in the room. The hood stays down.” Scroll looked at her. “You share a room with her. You know more than I do about why.”

“She made her choice,” Wendy said simply.

Scroll looked at her. “Her choice.”

“You’ve guessed what the choice was. You don’t need me to say it.” Wendy smoothed the book’s cover with her palm. “She has feelings for His Highness Roland Wimbledon. This is not something that required deduction — it’s been visible for some time. It’s also not uncommon. When someone shelters a witch, cares for her genuinely, lets her be what she is without asking her to pretend otherwise — it is only a matter of time before some of the sisters find themselves in that position. We saw it, occasionally, during our years with the Association.”

“Those stories mostly ended badly,” Scroll said.

“He’s not the same as those people.”

The statement’s confidence caught Scroll off guard. She’d held the same position as Wendy for years — caution, distance, the practical maintenance of sisterhood as the primary loyalty — and to hear Wendy abandon it felt like watching a principle she’d thought load-bearing simply step aside.

“Wendy. The witches can’t have children. He’s a prince, he needs an heir, the—”

“He said he would marry a witch.” Wendy looked at her steadily. “He said this to you directly. You were there when he said it.”

So Nightingale was there, and Nightingale told her. Scroll felt the shape of several conversations she had not been part of. “I didn’t tell anyone because I didn’t want it to get out. If it becomes known before he’s secured his position—”

“I know. I told Nightingale the same thing. The secret stays in this room.” Wendy paused. “What I’m saying is that knowing his answer changed my view of the situation. Before I knew it, I thought the best outcome would be that this feeling came to nothing — kindly, without hurt, but to nothing. Now I’m not sure that’s what I want for her. Or for him.” She looked at the window, where the afternoon light was coming in straight and bright. “When Nightingale was suppressing it, she was always slightly sad. I prefer how she looks now, regardless of how it resolves. At least she’s following her own heart.”

Scroll considered this.

She thought about Cara — the former leader, who had managed the Witch Cooperation Association with a form of care that had always contained within it the assumption that she knew better, that the sisters needed direction and protection from their own impulses, that decisions were best made for people rather than handed to them. Then she thought about Wendy, who had spent years watching this from the inside and had apparently decided something completely different about what help actually looked like.

There was a difference between those two approaches that Scroll had not, before this moment, put into words.

“There’s still a serious problem,” she said. “Does His Highness know the witches can’t bear children? What if his decision to say that was made without knowing this?”

Wendy’s voice went slightly depressed. “That’s exactly what I’m not sure of.”

They were quiet together for a moment.

“How about,” Wendy said, in a tone that suggested she already knew the answer but was asking anyway, “you go and ask him?”

West of the town walls, in the bright June afternoon.

The shooting range they’d set up along the grassland was informal: targets on posts, various distances, and Carter standing with his arms folded trying not to look impressed. The cattle grazing in the middle distance made no comment. Three months ago this land had been under snow and demonic beasts; now it was warm and ordinary and full of the particular life that reasserted itself without fanfare once conditions permitted.

Nightingale had been practicing since midmorning. The initial instruction had taken twenty minutes.

Roland watched her reload — smoothly, without fumbling, the cylinder swinging out and the spent cartridges knocked clear with the butt of her palm in a motion she’d needed to be shown once before it was simply part of what her hands knew. She was fast. She was faster than she had any right to be after a single afternoon’s practice, and Roland had the uncomfortable sense that whatever speed he’d anticipated had been an underestimate.

“All five targets in the simulation,” Carter said, still not quite believing what he’d just seen. “In — I don’t know. Less than ten seconds, from inside the fog, stepping out only for the instant of each shot. I couldn’t track her.” He looked at Roland. “I genuinely could not follow where she was between shots.”

“That was the point,” Roland said.

The simulation had been five targets at varying distances, hung over God’s Stone of Retaliation fragments so they registered clearly in Nightingale’s fog-perception. The constraint: expose herself for the minimum possible time during each shot. What she’d produced was something that looked, from the outside, like a white figure appeared briefly and a target fell, then the figure had never been where you were looking and another target fell, then your eyes refused to track fast enough to give you useful information about where the threat was coming from.

In sequence: five targets, five shots, one sequence of motion that an observer could not parse into individual components.

She came back to stand beside him, wiping the sweat from the tip of her nose with the back of her hand and then — apparently without thinking — wiping that hand on Roland’s sleeve.

“Did I graduate?” she asked.

“Unambiguously,” Roland said.

“I must say,” Carter offered, with the tone of a man who had been beaten by an extraordinary witch in single combat and had now watched her add firearms to the list of her capabilities, “I hope she is always on our side.”

“Why would I be anywhere else?” Nightingale said, and holstered the revolvers with both hands simultaneously.

In the afternoon light, with the grassland behind her and the pistols at her sides and the very slight smile that was her version of uncomplicated satisfaction, she looked, Roland thought, exactly like someone who had finally settled into what they were.

Carter was still staring.

“Put your eyes back in your head, Chief Knight,” Roland said.

“Yes, Your Highness,” Carter said, and looked away, and looked back.

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